Monday, November 12, 2012

Can You Handle the Truth?

"We're not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers." -Mitt Romney's pollster, Neil Newhouse, during the Republican National Convention

As things turned out last Tuesday, that was the fatal flaw in Mitt Romney's campaign for the presidency: a refusal to accept, or even acknowledge, basic truths. It shouldn't be a huge surprise that a party whose leaders resist the science of climate change and evolution isn't big on math, either. The Romney campaign played fast and loose with the facts all summer and fall, but there's no truth-in-advertising law for politicians. Society can debate whose scientific theories are more valid, and candidates can squabble over whose ads are more mendacious. But once the ballots are cast and counted, one side's guess about the makeup of the electorate is going to be proven right and the other wrong. In 2012, the assumptions made by most of the public pollsters, and those working for the Obama campaign - the ones that drew so much scorn and ridicule from the GOP and Romney's own polling team - turned out to be dead on, and Romney's, dead wrong.

I wrote on Election Eve that this race reminded me very much of 2004, when President Bush squeaked out a narrow re-election win over John Kerry. Bush beat Kerry in the popular vote that year, 50.7% to 48.3%. As I write this, with some ballots still to be counted, President Obama has 50.5% of the popular vote, to Romney's 47.9%. That's awfully close to what happened in 2004 (it's also the closest I've ever been to nailing my final prediction, which was Obama 50.2 to Romney 47.9).

Throughout the campaign, Romney operatives, and some pollsters, insisted there was no way the broad coalition of young voters, African Americans, Latinos and inspired independents that propelled Barack Obama to history in 2008 was going to turn out for him this time. Too much disappointment and disenchantment on the left, they said; the bloom is off the rose. Romney will benefit from an enthusiasm gap; the electorate will be more like the one Bush got in '04. They shredded polls that projected a Democratic turnout advantage of five, six, seven points (Democrats outnumbered Republicans by seven points in the '08 election). What they failed to grasp - despite many, many polls suggesting this - was that Republican voters were even less enthusiastic about their nominee than Democrats were about President Obama. Consistently, Romney supporters told the pollsters they were voting against the president more than they were voting for the GOP nominee. Obama voters, meanwhile, were overwhelmingly casting ballots for his re-election, not against Romney. The steady parade of "Anyone But Romney" Republican frontrunners during the primaries should have been enough of a warning sign for Romney and his strategists. But, blinders on, the Romney team ignored all of that data, or insisted it was wrong, preferring instead to shoot out constant emails about huge, excited crowds at rallies and the proliferation of Romney-Ryan yard signs. As I noted last week, crowd count is not a reliable predictor of success on Election Day. A majority of voters simply didn't trust Romney, and they didn't feel he connected with them on a real level. The lack of credibility, authenticity and embrace of reality permeated his campaign and doomed it from the start.

I took much of the GOP's ostensible optimism and confidence in the campaign's closing days as so much bluster. Surely, they had to see what the rest of us did: that all signs pointed to the president's re-election. There was simply no denying the data, and the sense of momentum for Mr. Obama that accelerated after Hurricane Sandy. But no, their post-election comments reveal that the Romney team really didn't see defeat coming at all. On Election Day, the youth turnout didn't go down - it went up, one percentage point from 2008. The African American vote didn't decline - it increased, especially in Ohio, where it went from 11% of the electorate in '08 to 15% this year. The Republican effort to make voting more difficult backfired, motivating minority voters in particular to stand in line for hours to cast their ballots for the president. And an enormous Latino tide, with 71% of those voters preferring Barack Obama, simply swept Mitt Romney's erroneous assumptions away, and with them, his shot at the presidency. In fact, of the major ethnic groups, only the white vote declined. Democrats made up 38% of the electorate this time around, and Republicans 32%, with independents and others constituting the rest: in other words, exactly the six-point advantage many of those GOP-derided polls assumed.

I took some heat on Twitter for suggesting that the Gallup and Rasmussen polls were using flawed methodology. "It's pretty obvious you just like the polls that show Obama is winning," one critic tweeted. No, I like the ones whose methods make sense, and to me that seemed to be IBD/TIPP and Reuters/Ipsos. I was slightly suspect of Public Policy Polling, a firm that works for Democratic campaigns, because their surveys seemed to overstate Obama's support and looked like slight outliers. As we review the polls now, it was PPP, IBD/TIPP and Reuters/Ipsos who were most accurate. Rasmussen skewed way to the Republican side, as it often does, and Gallup simply blew it, by assuming a much whiter electorate and excluding too many actual voters with its "likely voter" screen. Gallup has been around since 1947 and is America's best-known pollster by far, but I will no longer consider them reliable until I see them get a major election right again (they were among the least accurate in 2008, too).

I also am not a fan of the Real Clear Politics average, and I hope the outcome of this election illustrates why. RCP's final average gave President Obama a 0.7% lead. He won by 2.6%, subject to slight revision. That's a fairly significant miss. You can't simply add the 53% reported by a live poll of 2000 people with landlines and cellphones to the 49% from a poll of 300 people by robocall and call it an "average" of 51%, which is what RCP does (in this example, the true average of those two polls would be 52.5%, and their differing methodologies would render even that result suspect). I hope lazy media outlets stop reporting that "average" as some sort of useful and informative number.

I am curious to see if the Republican Party reverts to denial within a few months of absorbing this defeat. The demographic trends can't be ignored: take a look at California if you want to see the future of the national GOP if it makes the mistake of doing so. The Republican Party teeters on the brink of irrelevancy in the Golden State, where Democrats hold every statewide office and two-thirds of the legislature. Mitt Romney won only 38% of the presidential vote. Latinos and young voters here are overwhelmingly Democratic. The national GOP leaders can't be that blind. But will they react cynically - showcasing Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Susana Martinez while still hewing to the social conservative line - or will they moderate their views, compromise on immigration reform and taxes and give up the ghost on things like repealing Roe v. Wade and banning same sex marriage? It's hard to imagine John Boehner and company moving very far to the middle, for very long.

One thing is certain: the 2016 primaries will be fascinating. 2008 was the first wide-open race, with no incumbent president or vice president running for either party's nomination, since 1928. Now we'll have a second one, just eight years later, assuming Joe Biden doesn't take a third shot at running for president (he will be 73, and delusional if he thinks he can win). On the Democratic side, it should be Hillary Clinton versus the field (Andrew Cuomo, Martin O'Malley, maybe Elizabeth Warren?), with a huge and deep potential field for the Republicans, led by Rubio, Paul Ryan, Chris Christie, Bobby Jindal, Scott Walker, Rick Santorum and maybe Nikki Haley, Bob McDonnell, Rand Paul and a few others, too. That's an extremely conservative bunch, with Christie the most able to position himself as a centrist. Most of those Republican candidates are likely to run as right wing purists and point to Romney's defeat as a reason why. That could easily mean an even more lopsided Democratic victory four years from now.

A few interesting nuggets from this election:

Mitt Romney lost Massachusetts by 23 points, the worst home state defeat ever for a governor (or former governor) running for president. The old record was 20 points, set by Ohio Governor James Cox in 1920, but he lost to a fellow Ohioan, Senator Warren Harding, so neither had the home field advantage. The worst previous home state loss to someone from a different state was only eight points, by Kansas Governor Alf Landon to FDR (of New York) in 1936, so Romney really shattered this one.

Obama won all four "new" states (NY, NJ, NH and NM) while Romney won all the North, South and West ones (NC, SC, ND, SD and WV).

Obama swept all the swing states and won all the battleground states except North Carolina.

Mitt Romney not only lost his home state (MA), he also lost his birth state (Michigan) and the other two states in which he owns homes, New Hampshire and California. He did win Utah, by a larger margin than any other state (48 points) but he no longer owns a residence there.

The states that were thought to be among the closest really weren't. Obama won both Iowa and Wisconsin by almost six points, Colorado and Pennsylvania by more than five, Nevada by almost seven, Michigan by almost ten. Only Ohio (Obama by 2), Virginia (Obama by 3), Florida (Obama by 1) and North Carolina (Romney by 2) were close.

This is only the second time in history that three consecutive presidents have been elected to two terms. The first time was Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and James Monroe, from 1800-1820. This time it's Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, from 1992-present. Perhaps that says something about the power of incumbency in the era of television advertising and unlimited campaign spending.

Barack Obama is only the third president in history to be re-elected with fewer electoral votes than he won the first time around (Woodrow Wilson in 1916; FDR in both 1940 and 1944).

Obama is only the third Democrat to win more than 50% of the popular vote twice (Andrew Jackson and FDR are the others. The other three two-term Democratic presidents, Grover Cleveland, Woodrow Wilson and Bill Clinton, never hit 50% in any of their victories).

New Hampshire is the first state ever to elect women to every major office (Governor, both U.S. Senators and both of its Congressional seats).

Hawaii is sending Congress its first Hindu member ever (Tulsi Gabbard, a Democratic woman originally from American Samoa) and will also give the Senate its first Asian-American woman and first Buddhist ever, in the person of Mazie Hirono.

There will be 20 women in the U.S. Senate, a record, including the first lesbian (Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin).

There will be seven gay members of Congress, enough to have an actual caucus.

See, this is how I spend my time, looking up stuff like this so you don't have to.

One final statistic: for the 9th time in 11 tries, I predicted the winner of the presidential election correctly. I got 49 states right this time, my best showing ever. As noted above, I nailed Romney's popular vote and I'm only 0.3% off on Obama's, although those numbers could still change. That's actually better than Nate Silver, for all you 538 junkies (I am proudly one). He can have the glory, I just like to be right. Facts can be fun, and good for you too, a lesson the Romney campaign would have done well to learn at the start of this campaign.

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About Doug

Doug began his career as a copy boy at the New York Times & then moved to California to play in a rock band. After hundreds of gigs and one Indie album failed to make him a rock star, Doug returned to journalism, working for AP Radio & San Francisco station K-101. He did a brief stint at KGO before joining KCBS in 1990. Doug covers politics for KCBS, and also does special features and investigations. He has won more than 200 broadcast journalism awards, including a duPont-Columbia Special Citation, 10 National Headliner Awards, five national Edward R. Murrow Awards & a record eight awards from the national Society of Professional Journalists - more than any other reporter, in any medium. Doug was also the first three-time winner of the AP's Reporter of the Year Award for California/Nevada & has won it four times overall.
Doug was born in New York City, raised in Manhattan and Wisconsin, and has a degree in History from Brown University. He lives in Oakland with his wife, Dr. Sara Newmann. And yes, he still plays music! He is the bass player for the Eyewitness Blues Band, made up of broadcasters from KCBS and CBS-5 TV.